In a traditional meaning, a “form” is a printed or typed document with blank spaces for insertion of required or requested information. A form is convenient for communication, for example, between a person and an organization. The organization is, for example, a governmental institution or a business enterprise.
Taking an invoice document as an illustrative example, the document is a filled-in form. The form contains a standardized portion for defining name and date fields (i.e. the “form”) and a specialized portion for the particular name and particular date.
With the advent of computer technology and the use of computer applications either by the organization or by the person, the term “form” is broadened. As used in this patent application, a “form” stands for any electronic document with predefined format that contains blank fields for filling with data. A “filled-in form” or “final document” is a form where the blank fields are already filled with data.
The organizations use business application programs to organize information flow within the organization or to communicate to and from the organization. Application programs are, for example, programs to assist customer relationship management (CRM), finance management, and human resource management. Although the application programs are different and are often customized to the organization, it is common for most of them that information flow leaving the organization uses the final document on a traditional medium, such as paper.
Often, the final documents are invoices, delivery notes, reminder letters, purchase orders, checks, or customs declarations. For example, an invoice form has pages (e.g., sheets of paper), text areas (e.g., for printing positions to be invoiced, often in tables; greetings to the recipient), an address area (e.g., for printing recipients'address), and a graphic area (e.g., for printing a logotype of the sender).
Form definitions comprise, for example, page breaks, line breaks, fonts indicators, position information, indent, tabulators, protection against line breaks in paragraph, and others.
At a first time point, a form designer (hereinafter “user”) creates a new form by a so-called “form builder”, a computer program that resembles a commercially available text and image processing program. Logical combinations of layout items are coded by a programming language, thus the user must be familiar with this.
At a second, later time point, an output program reads data from the application program, instantiates the form and prints the final documents. The output program receives the data via a predefined form-interface from the application program.
For creating forms, the following references are useful: U.S. Pat. No. 5,857,034 to Tsuchiya et al.; EP 0230 994 to Muller et al.; DE 4308291C2 to Audi. There is an ongoing need to provide form defining software that alleviates the user from being computer language literate.